Imagine…
I imagine there are lots of people in similar situations.
In this post I want to explore how I’m tackling a similar problem, both for my own benefit and in the hope it’ll be useful to others. (more…)
The company I work for, TigerLead.com, has another job opening in West LA:
As a Senior Developer, you will be playing a central role in the design, development, and delivery of cutting-edge web applications for one of the most heavily-trafficked network of real estate sites on the web. You will work in a small, collaborative environment with other seasoned pros and with the direct support of the company’s owners and senior management. Your canvas and raw materials include rich data sets totaling several million property listings replenished daily by hundreds of external data feeds. This valuable data and our powerful end-user tools to access it are deployed across several thousand real estate search sites used by more than a million home-buyer leads and growing by 50K+ users each month. The 1M+ leads using our search tools are in turn tracked and cultivated by the several thousand real estate professionals using our management software. This is an outstanding opportunity to see your creations immediately embraced by a large community of users as you work within a creative and supportive environment that is both professional and non-bureaucratic at the same time, offering the positives of a start-up culture without the drama and instability.
If that sounds like interesting work to you then take a look at the full job posting.
TigerLead is a lovely company to work for and this is a great opportunity. Highly recommended.
In this post I’m going to talk about the java2perl6api project. What its goals are, why I think it’s important, how it relates to a Perl 6 DBI, what exists now, what’s needs doing, and how you can help.
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Please forgive the title!
Perl has three regular expression match variables ( $& $‘ $’ ) which hold the string that the last regular expression matched, the string before the match, and the string after the match, respectively.
As you’re probably aware, the mere presence of any of these variables, anywhere in the code, even if never accessed, will slow down all regular expression matches in the entire program. (See the WARNING at the end of the Capture Buffers section of the perlre documentation for more information.)
Clearly this is not good.
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The name Buzz Moschetti probably isn’t familiar to you. Buzz was the author of the Perl 4 database for Interbase known as Interperl.
Back in those days Perl 5 was barely a twinkle in Larry’s eye and database interfaces for Perl 4 required building a custom perl binary.
Buzz was one of the four people to get the email on September 29th 1992 from Ted Lemon that started the perldb-interest project which defined a specification that ultimately lead to the DBI. (The other people were Kurt Andersen re informix, Kevin Stock re oraperl, and Michael Peppler re sybperl. I joined a few days later.)
Update: It turns out that it was actually Buzz who sent that original email, Ted just forwarded it on to others, including me. So Buzz can be said to have started the process that led to the DBI!
I hadn’t heard from Buzz for many years until he sent me an email recently.
This is his story: (more…)
I’ve recently started looking into geocoding in perl. We’re currently using some old hand-coded logic to query the Yahoo Search API. I wanted to switch to Geo::Coder::Yahoo but I noticed that that depended on Yahoo::Search which hadn’t been updated since March 2007 and had accumulated a number of bug reports (which may well be closed by the time you read this).
Several related to the fact that Yahoo::Search didn’t handle Unicode properly when using its default internal XML parser (instead of the optional XML::Simple which does the right thing, but slowly).
What happened next makes a nice little example of getting things done in the Open Source world… (more…)
Where I’m working at the moment we’re using the Yahoo Geocoding API but aren’t very happy with it. I’ve been asked to look into how we can improve our geo coding.
I released Devel::NYTProf v3 on Christmas Eve 2009. Over the next couple of months a few more features were added. The v3 work had involved a complete rewrite of the subroutine profiler and heavy work on much else besides. At that point I felt I’d done enough with NYTProf for now and it was time to focus on other more pressing projects.
Over those months I’d also started working on enhancements for PostgreSQL PL/Perl. That project turned into something of an epic adventure with more than its fair share of highs and lows and twists and turns. The dust is only just settling now. I would have blogged about it but security issues arose that led the PostgreSQL team to consider removing the plperl language entirely. Fortunately I was able to help avoid that by removing Safe.pm entirely! At some point I hope to write a blog post worthy of the journey. Meanwhile, if you’re using PostgreSQL, you really do want to upgrade to the latest point-release.
One of the my goals in enhancing PostgreSQL PL/Perl was improve the integration with NYTProf. I wanted to be able to profile PL/Perl code embedded in the database server. With PostgreSQL 8.4 I could get the profiler to run, with some hackery, but in the report the subroutines were all __ANON__ and you couldn’t see the source code, so there were no statement timings. It was useless.
The key problem was that Devel::NYTProf couldn’t see into string evals properly. To fix that I had to go back spelunking deep in the NYTProf guts again; mostly in the data model and report generation code. With NYTProf v4, string evals are now treated as files, mostly, and a whole new level of insight is opened up!
In the rest of this post I’ll be describing this and other new features.
Speaking of belated screencasts, I also haven’t blogged about my visit to the Ann Arbor Perl Mongers in Michigan.
The Ann Arbor Perl Mongers group was being restarted (after a 10 year gap) by the TigerLead tech team. I’m working for TigerLead and was going to be in Ann Arbor for a meeting so they asked me to give a couple of talks: Devel::NYTProf and Perl Myths.
I like giving talks at events like these because there’s no set time limit and the audience is more relaxed (the free pizza probably helped).
I’ve uploaded a screencast of the Perl Myths talk. As usual it covers the Perl jobs market, CPAN, best practices, power tools, community and perl6. At almost 1 hour 20 minutes it’s significantly longer than my usual, more rushed, 40 minute version given at conferences and includes 15 minutes of Q & A at the end.
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